Baxter Boulevard is a

boulevard A boulevard is a type of broad avenue planted with rows of trees, or in parts of North America, any urban highway or wide road in a commercial district. In Europe, boulevards were originally circumferential roads following the line of former ...

and

parkway A parkway is a landscaped thoroughfare. The term is particularly used for a roadway in a park or connecting to a park from which trucks and other heavy vehicles are excluded. Over the years, many different types of roads have been labeled p ...

Portland, Maine Portland is the List of municipalities in Maine, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maine and the county seat, seat of Cumberland County, Maine, Cumberland County. Portland's population was 68,408 at the 2020 census. The Portland metropolit ...

. The road, around long, served as the means to head north from downtown Portland before Tukey's Bridge, now on Interstate 295 (I-295), was built. The road was part of U.S. Route 1 (US 1) until May 2007. The parkway wraps around the west side of Back Cove estuary basin. The parkway and roadway began as an initiative of Mayor James Phinney Baxter, for whom it is named. It was envisioned as one of four parks in the city (along with Deering Oaks, Western Promenade and Eastern Promenade) which would encircle the city. The parkway was designed by the noted landscape design firm Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot in 1895. Property owners donated the then-useless land next to the cove and the walking and biking path were filled in to create the Back Cove Trail. Originally called the Back Cove Boulevard, the parkway opened in 1917. It covers . Tree planting began on the Boulevard in 1921 as a memorial to

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

victims. Baxter Boulevard was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

as a historic landscape district in October 1989.

References

Baxter family U.S. Route 1 1917 establishments in Maine Parks in Portland, Maine Streets in Portland, Maine World War I memorials in the United States Transport infrastructure completed in 1917 Parks established in the 1910s Protected areas established in 1917 {{Maine-struct-stub